The fog between the numbers
Sometimes one comes too late. Vital landscapes succeed and many escape us. The ones hold in time become experiences that accumulate one after another like footprints of different depth and shape. Some represent potholes difficult to get out from, others are just worlds that we once cherished and now we regret not having lived intensely. Finally, those still with us, only glimpsed in moments of apparent lucidity. The fog between the numbers that frame us, the space that runs between everything rigid, the air we lack, as any of the verses Wislawa Szymborska once wrote.
Poet, essayist and translator, Wislawa Szymborska was born in Prowent, Bnin, now part of Kórnik, Poland, in 1923. Soon her family moved to Krakow where she lived until her death just some days ago at age 88. Despite the difficult circumstances she lived, as the invasion of Poland by Hitler's Germany when she was 16, or the communist dictatorship after World War II, she always enjoyed a great sense of humor and reminded us of our duty to feel fortunate to live in this world, as she wrote "" a modest corner, / in which the stars says good-night / and to which they blink / with no meaning". A modest corner she rediscovered in every of her eyes’ blink, as she was anxiously waiting for a fog above all to let her curiosity fly away once and again.
Her writings were the lucid fog that allowed us to build our new breath in front of mystery. It reflects the modesty of one who feels as holder of a treasure more valuable than our ability to appreciate it. A dozen books of poetry is his whole literary career of which she rejected the pre-1957 as too close to the socialist regime. Her life went by in her apartment always surrounded by chocolates and brandy, always close at hand, with her friends and asserting her idea "Only a little naive questions are truly profound."
The Nobel Prize came to her in 1996 and she sentenced in her accepting speech that "the poet of today is skeptical and even suspicious". Irony continually sticks out from her words, spoken or written. The three hundred pages that store all her writing are full of humor, mystery and doubt, always denying the great words and understanding that the contradiction is part of the game of life. Her poetry is now part of my landscape, despite the numbers.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Text by Juan Carlos Romero